Based on Microsoft's latest earnings report, its Surface RT is a flop. This, in turn, means that Windows RT has failed. But, there are many other would-be tablet operating system challengers to Google's Android and Apple's iOS. Seriously, though, do any of them have a real shot?

There are hundreds of millions of tablets out there, but will any significant number of them ever run anything besides Android or iOS?

Does anyone else have a chance? Blackberry may have given up, but there are many others who want to dethrone Android and iOS. Here, are the leading contenders in the order I rank their chances.

1) Firefox: Firefox is actually ahead of Ubuntu on smartphones with its Linux-based Firefox operating system. For applications, Firefox will rely upon Web-based HTML5 apps. It's an unproven route, but as we put more and more of our apps on the Web and the cloud, it may be a workable one.

I've always been fond of Unity on devices, and I think Ubuntu has a real shot. For now, Firefox is ahead in actually shipping units. We'll see it's that still the case by year's end.

3) Sailfish: When Nokia turned its back on the MeeGo mobile Linux project and bought into Windows Phone, five Nokia staffers started their own company, Jolla, to keep pursuing an open-source operating system approach, Sailfish OS. Unlike Mozilla and Tizen, Sailfish relies on the old Linux stand-by Qt QML, instead of HTML5 for its apps.

That's a lot of potential players in the tablet space. All of them, except Microsoft, still aren't even really ready to compete yet. Perhaps in 2015, there will be a viable third-party tablet OS, but I really can't see it happening until then. In the meantime, Android and iOS will remain the top tablet dogs.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it.His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications...
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